lenten journal: what's the story?

A couple of nights ago, I posted what has come to be known as the Kony 2012 Video as my blog post. I learned of it through my eleventh graders. One of them was in a documentary studies class I taught last year in which we watched “Ghosts of Rwanda,” a Frontline piece looking at the Rwandan genocide ten years later and “The Devil Came on Horseback,” which is about the human tragedy in Darfur. They know I grew up in Africa and that I am moved by stories of a continent with which I identify; they were moved by what we saw last year. And so, instead of the work I had planned, we watched Kony. They had lots of questions, not the least of which was, “Why don’t we do something to be a part of this? It seems important.”

I came home and made it my blog post on the basis of the residual sadness and anger I carry because Africa does not really matter to Americans as a general rule (as demonstrated in Rwanda and Darfur and mostly because our media have chosen to make connecting us to Africa less important than most anything) and because of the emotion I shared with my students in class. I had heard of Invisible Children but had not done any research on the organization. I knew of Joseph Kony, but not in any current sense. I was moved. I responded – just as the folks who made the video wanted me to do.

This morning, one of the folks I work with at the computer store posted this graphic 

with the caption,

For all of you who posted the Kony video, rather those about to post the video...

Then, from a number of sources, I began to read insight from folks who had also been moved by the video but who didn’t allow their emotion to control their first move. They asked good questions and looked beyond the well crafted call to immediate and specific action. Some of the questions were about the organization, some were about the veracity of the information, some were about the perspective from which the story was being told, some were about the choice of solution being offered. I offer three perspectives that are speaking to me today, all of whom are seeking to do more than criticize or cast suspicion and all of whom have personal ties to Africa.

I was pulled, in particular, by this video of a Ugandan woman who challenged those who would tell a story that is not their own:



Ethan Zuckerman writes at “My Heart’s in Accra":

I’m starting to wonder if this is a fundamental limit to attention-based advocacy. If we need simple narratives so people can amplify and spread them, are we forced to engage only with the simplest of problems? Or to propose only the simplest of solutions?

As someone who believes that the ability to create and share media is an important form of power, the Invisible Children story presents a difficult paradox. If we want people to pay attention to the issues we care about, do we need to oversimplify them? And if we do, do our simplistic framings do more unintentional harm than intentional good? Or is the wave of pushback against this campaign from Invisible Children evidence that we’re learning to read and write complex narratives online, and that a college student with doubts about a campaign’s value and validity can find an audience? Will Invisible Children’s campaign continue unchanged, or will it engage with critics and design a more complex and nuanced response.

That’s a story worth watching.

Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay writes,

Most people don’t want to feel like they are being rescued. That can be humiliating. So… what do we do with a movement that does not work toward dignity?

Do we simply applaud it for the marketing genius that it is? Do we buy into it and support the cause even if it turns out to be misguided or misinformed because we don’t want to be the poop in the punch bowl?

In closing, I do applaud the western world for looking at this situation in the world. It is far beyond our backyards and it does not encroach on our drive into work, or our gaming, or general lives… We have shown in our immediacy that we do have pulses and hearts. We have shown that our reflex toward justice is still strong. What we should do is match our passion for justice with wisdom and humility. It was Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, who told me, “ Justice without mercy is tyranny.”

Thank Invisible Children for bringing this issue into the public conscience. Please take a breath and walk humbly into the realm of action.

How do we keep the work from hurting more than helping? These are the questions that we must ask. These are the questions that I wish Invisible Children was asking before they launched this campaign to coincide with our election year. It is a good marketing idea. It just isn’t a great and dignifying form of action.

Loving kindness, doing justice, and walking humbly with our God calls for us to live in the creative tension between immediate response and thoughtful action; it also calls us to learn how to let listening be our primary posture. (You realize, I hope, I’m talking mostly to myself here.) I’ve written recently about wondering what Jesus would ask; I wonder, in this case, if the questions might include

Who is telling the story? and
To whom does the story belong?

Then I can ask -- ask them and ask God, “What is my role in their story?” and become a part of the cast.

Peace,
Milton

bewteen friends

My mind is all over the place.

Perhaps I would state it better to say my mind has been bombarded by several things that have set it swirling. I can’t help thinking about what is happening in Gaza; part of the reason it bothers me is I feel helpless to do anything about it. I think I feel that way about much of what is going on in the world. I was going through the various blogs I read this morning and read this from Randy:

I was listening to NPR on my way to work this morning, as is my wont. They were discussing the crisis of the moment, which is the story about how big bad Israel is attacking the poor innocent people of Gaza.

Randy and I have never met, though we communicate from time to time. Though we rarely come to the same conclusions about most anything, we stay connected, for which I am grateful. What hit me about his post, more than any conclusion he drew, was his phrase, “the crisis of the moment.” Maybe part of my sense of helplessness is I feel as though we live in such a state of cultural ADD that we don’t pay attention long enough to allow ourselves to be moved into action by our compassion.

One of my Christmas presents was a subscription to the UNTE Reader, a unabashedly lefty magazine that always gives me something to think about. In the latest issue, Richard Just has written an article entitled, “On Our Watch: The world is inundated with stories about the genocide in Darfur. So why haven’t we stopped it?” He talks about all that has been said and filmed and written about the mass murders and rapes and tortures there and then asks:

What has gone wrong? Did we, over time, grow immune to the images and the testimonies? Did we give too much weight to what seemed like the conflict’s complexities, and too little to the raw human suffering that was taking place before our eyes? Did we put too much faith in the United Nations and too little in ourselves? Did we allow our elected leaders to seduce us with airy statements congratulating us on our passion, when they should have been consulting with generals about how to get soldiers onto the ground as quickly as possible? True, we were poorly served by a small-minded president and his bungling administration. But did liberals demand the right things of him? Did we push for what would really save the people of Darfur? Or did we get trapped by the inclinations of our worldview, and advocate for too little?

My friend Jimmy, writes about his recent trip to New Orleans to help folks still recovering from Hurricane Katrina:

Each person I met during the week had a story of how Katrina changed their lives.. Some left the city before and returned months later to find all they ever had was gone. A few I met had to be rescued from the roof of their homes as the water filled the neighborhoods in moments. Regardless of the story there is still much to be done in New Orleans to return folks to their homes. As of last week, there were 150,000 homes in New Orleans that need to be renovated, rebuilt or razed. Only 8,000 building permits were completed in 2008, at that rate it will take at least ten years to complete the rebuild of New Orleans and at least a generation to restore the city. As time moves further from the date of the storm, more and more folks will forget about the folks in New Orleans rebuilding their homes and communities.

In the last of today’s readings, I found this paragraph in Ron Martoia’s Transformational Architecture: Reshaping Our Lives as Narrative, which talks about much of Christianity’s focus on getting people into heaven over doing God’s transforming work in real time:

What if Jesus came to address human need, to bring shalom, to dole out free “pink spoon” samples – and in the process have people join his family, a family that lives together in harmony and love? Is it possible our whole construal of salvation is so other worldly that we don’t know how to read the [biblical] text honestly and as a result aren’t sure how to help the world?

I have more questions than I know what to do with. Instead of trying to answer them all, or even voice them all, I want to point to two things I also found tonight among what I’ve already mentioned that are helping me to move beyond hopelessness to a place where I can better see how I can incarnate compassion.

One I found also on the UTNE site: a link to a blog written by Hope Man, an Israeli living near the border of Gaza, and Peace Man, a Palestinian who lives about ten miles away in Gaza. Their answer to what is going on around them is to write together and to get to know one another, because they said hardly anyone knew people on the other side of the border. I remember years ago reading that the peace process in Northern Ireland began to take hold in large part because there were Catholic and Protestant women who crossed into No Man’s Land everyday to pray together, convinced that their burgeoning friendships could make a difference.

The second is on my friend Jimmy’s blog. His latest post not only tells about how New Orleans is still reeling, but describes how he plans to respond. He is, among other things, a carpenter. The winter weather and the frozen economy have left him with time, so he is planning to go to New Orleans for a month to rebuild all he can. He is raising money to cover his family’s expenses so their lives can go on as he helps to put the lives of others back together. I love the audacious compassion that comes through in the title of his post: “Help Me Rebuild New Orleans.” Please help him if you can.

Though the presidents and generals can give the orders to drop the bombs, they appear to be unable to wage peace. The media is prisoner to the “crisis du jour” and unable, for the most part, to tell us stories that foster hope and action for longer than a day or two. Friendships are what change the world – the relational commitments to enter into one another’s pain, to listen before we speak, to allow our lives to be filled with hope and trust and loyalty based not on doctrine or policy or ethnicity, but on the love between friends.

OK. I’m better now.

Peace,
Milton

time is love

Many years ago when I was a youth minister, I began our regular Wednesday night gathering by asking the kids to write down the names of the ten people most important to them. Then I said, “’I don’t have time’ is just a euphemism for ‘I don’t care.’ Then I said, “Your sports team is taking more time than you thought; cross one name off the list.” Except for a few minor protests, they did what I asked. I continued to come up with things that took their time and continued to tell them to cross out names. The mood in the room became tense, even desperate. Some were close to tears. I took it all the way out, until we had crossed out all ten names, and then I said, again,

“’I don’t have time’ is a euphemism for ‘I don’t care.’”

We talked for a good while about the veracity of my statement, struggling with the ideas and feelings, and then we shared Communion together. Yes, it was outlandish. Yes, it was somewhat over the top. And yes, it was true.

The evening came to mind for me this week when I heard that our government has spent nearly $500 billion so far on the war in Iraq. Here’s an ongoing count:



I have no idea how to wrap my mind around a half a trillion dollars. If I had a million dollars and was told to leave my house, spend a thousand dollars a day, and not return until the money was gone, I would not be back for almost three years. We spend $200 million a day in Iraq; I would have to be gone six hundred years to spend that much. $500 billion is 5,000 million. As I watch the counter move at such a rapid pace, I wonder if it isn’t fair to say, “’We don’t have money for that’ is the same as ‘we don’t care.’”

According to UN statistics, 40 million people in the world are HIV positive, most of them in the developing world. At the end of May, President Bush pledged, with great fanfare, to provide $30 billion to fight AIDS in Africa over the next five years, which amounts to almost $16.5 million a day -- less than ten percent of what we are spending on the war.

The genocide in Darfur, Sudan began the same month the US invaded Iraq. According to the White House’s own numbers, the US has provided $1.7 billion in aid to the region during that time – and our government is the largest donor. We spend that much every couple of weeks to fight a war.

If time and money are euphemisms for compassion, our government is making a very clear statement.

And, I’m afraid, so am I.

The last time I wrote about Darfur was back in April. I keep links here, but I’ve not taken time to do my part, nor have I sent money to anyone. 2.5 million people have been displaced (a euphemism for running scared into the desert where they live lives worse than animals) by the violence. Over 200,000 have been killed. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 70,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war there and those fleeing their country in fear and desperation are now counted in millions.

I’ve been busy with my own stuff. My car’s in the shop and is going to cost more than I expected. I have to go to work and then I have a lot of things to get done around the house. I haven’t had time. I haven’t had money.

I know this will probably be one of those posts that doesn’t draw many comments. I’m not sure how to respond to it myself. I wonder why we are so silent. Underneath the mindless chatter of the twenty-four hour news channels and their posturing pundits, we, the citizens, have been seemingly anesthetized by stress, fear, and overload to the point we are convinced our time and money can’t make a difference. Beyond the possibilities of mass movements, I realize I can easily go days without any significant conversations about Iraq or Darfur. How can that be? I’m paying attention. I think I’m a world citizen. I just haven’t had time.

Sara Miles talks about Jesus offering “a radically inclusive love that accompanied people in the most ordinary of actions – eating, drinking, walking – and stayed with them, through fear, even past death. That love meant giving yourself away, embracing outsiders as family, emptying yourself to feed and live for others.”

Man, I want to live that way. I want to love like that. I want people from Duxbury to Darfur to know that love. I keep saying that, yet, up until now, I haven’t had time to really live it out.

Peace,
Milton

global days for darfur

Yes, I know I'm posting a couple of times today. I wanted to talk about the blog tour, but the thing most on my mind is the Global Days for Darfur initiative taking place this week around the world thanks to the Save Darfur Coalition. The volume of voices calling for significant action to save the people of Darfur is rising and things are beginning to happen. This could be a pivotal week in holding our world leaders accountable for changing the plight of the people who are being raped, starved, and murdered in the Sudan.

Please take time to look at the site.

You can find an event in your area here.

You can download a faith action packet with worship resources here.

The time is now for us to step forward and save our brothers and sisters.


Peace,
Milton

(Photographs are from SaveDarfur.org)

response

I’m thankful I woke up this morning late enough to miss NBC’s airing of the video of Cho Seung-Hui that he mailed before he started shooting people in Blacksburg. I don’t want to see it. I know I don’t need to. What I did read were the anonymous comments from one angry person to Tracy’s wonderful post at Spilt Milk. If you could scream when you write, this guy was yelling at the top of his lungs about how crazy and angry all the Muslims were. I don’t think he saw his own irony. I read a sad story on Raising Yousuf about a Palestinian woman’s difficulty leaving the Amsterdam airport just because she was a Muslim woman.

The level of violence we reach in the name of “securing the homeland,” or whatever name we use to say we want to be safe, makes me angry. To avoid adding to the violence and turmoil, the best things I know to do are add a new recipe and turn to poetry.

Response

Fear is hand delivered:
trench-coated high
schoolers, hijackers,
car bombers,
suicidal shooters.

Fighting to feel safe
is like eating gravy with a fork.

Get on a plane.
Go to class.
Drop off the kids.
Cross the street.
See what happens.

Life doesn’t follow
an ascending trajectory.

Fearing and fighting
are not our only options.
We can choose faith --
drop our guards
and our guns.

We won’t feel safe, secure
or even in control.
Waging peace
has never been
for the faint of heart.

Peace,
Milton

common bond

Besides trying to figure out how to create another sidebar on my blog, I spent a good part of the evening reading how various folks have responded to the killings at Virginia Tech. My heart aches for the families and friends of those who were killed, for all the VT students who never imagined their college days would be so indelibly marked by such an horrific tragedy, and for the school and city officials who have become the targets of so much of the rage that can’t find any other resting place.

We woke up this morning to Matt and Meredith sitting on the campus lawn in Blacksburg with a “special report.” They, along with who knows how many different media outlets, both large and small, descended on the college so we all could have up to the minute coverage. They went to commercial with a special logo and subdued music. One of the reporters did a small piece interviewing a handful of students and closed by saying something like, “They are still trying to figure out how to get on with their lives.” They’re going to be trying to figure that out for a long, long time.

The phrase that hung with me was one I heard repeated several times today: this was the largest killing spree in our nation’s history. Hyperbole or not, the statement is jarring. In all our years as a nation, not until 2007 did we have a day when a person killed over thirty people at once and then killed himself. For all practical purposes, he was a suicide bomber. Blacksburg, it seems, is not that far from Baghdad.

Our local news tonight began drawing lines from Boston to Blacksburg, making note of the kids from New England who were killed. Part of what the news people incarnate is our desire to not let those folks hurt alone. We want them to know this is our pain, not just theirs. Some from our neighborhood died too, we say. In a week that marks the anniversaries of the deaths at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the shootings at Columbine, we are all working hard to be galvanized by our pain, to share the weight of sorrow, to walk together through the valley of the shadow.

It’s good and important work.

We come together because we find comfort and strength, because we can incarnate love and grace to one another; because it hurts too damn much to be alone. Here, at the heart of our pain, comes the call to widen the circle of those who hurt like we do. Hardly a day goes by that thirty people don’t die in Iraq because of a suicide bomber. The people in Jerusalem and Gaza live with the same fear. This week the same thing has happened in Algiers and Afghanistan. Three hundred and thirty die everyday in Darfur. Everyone who dies is someone’s daughter, mother, son, father, friend. Our shared grief is the common denominator.

Since I grew up far away from my extended family, I didn’t go to a family funeral until I was almost out of high school. My first funeral during my seminary pastorate was only the second funeral I had ever attended. The funeral director in town was a retired minister and a great guy. He saw the raw fear in my eyes as I met with him and the family. “Come by in the morning,” he said, “and I’ll show you what to do.”

The man who died was a poor country man. His wife found him on the floor when she came back in from the garden. They were dirt poor. If they had lived in the city they would have been homeless. In the country, they lived in a shanty that was falling down around them. I drove up to their house and the widow met me at the door. I was at a loss as to what to do and, as she expressed her sorrow, I blurted, “I know how you feel.”

She stopped crying and looked up at me with astonishment. “Do you really?”

“No,” I stammered. “I don’t. I just didn’t know what to say.”

About that time, one of the women of the church – a widow for twenty years – knocked on the door and came in all in one motion. She kept moving until she was sitting next to the woman and had her arm around her shoulder. “Vergie,” she said.

“Thank you,” said the woman.

I watched the two women hold the sorrow like an infant, as though they had given birth to hope in that moment. After a little while, the woman looked up at me and said, “He was a good man.” And she began to tell me stories.

I have no idea what it feels like to be a student at Virginia Tech any more than I can grasp what it feels like to live in Baghdad or Darfur. In the past couple of years, I’ve stood with two close friends at their parents’ funerals. I don’t know what that feels like either. What I do know, from being with those friends, is it mattered I was there. It mattered that I called, that I noticed, that I reached out. I’ve missed some of those moments in the lives of other friends and it mattered when I didn’t show up as well.

When we talk about Darfur, the prevailing response, often, is we feel overwhelmed by the distance, by the problem, by our own pain. That we can feel a sense of solidarity with the students in Blacksburg gives me hope that we can find a sense of connection and commitment to the pain beyond our comfort zone. Grief does not have to drive us to fear or isolation. Clamoring for safety doesn’t bring much in the way of comfort. Compassion – voluntarily entering one another’s pain – is how we both grow and heal.

Peace,
Milton

new eyes to see

One of the things about Jesus' healing miracles is he asked different things of different people. Sometimes he simply said, "You're healed" and that was that. On other occasions, he asked questions first or told them to do something. Jesus healed one blind man by putting mud on his eyes and then telling him to go and wash. The first time, the man could only see partially. The people look like trees, he said. Jesus repeated the application of the mud and the man could see after he washed a second time.

Sometimes we gain our vision gradually, if not incrementally.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has offered the world an unprecedented view of the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. In conjunction with Google Earth (a program you can download for free), the museum has made it possible for us to see current satellite photographs of the areas of Darfur that have been plundered, burned, and destroyed. By clicking on the links, you can find photographs, video, and personal testimony to what has happened and what is going on now. Whatever we choose to do or not to do, we can no longer plead ignorance.

If you're looking for some way to be a part of the solution, savedarfur.org is organizing Global Days for Darfur -- April 23-30. They provide ways to find out what is happening in your area. You can also plan an event and register with them to get the word out.

I wrote a few days back about the move to use the upcoming Olympics as a way to pressure China into action on Darfur. Things have moved quickly on that front according to this New York Times article.

I also found new eyes to see a part of the world we hear a lot about, but see very little. Healing Iraq is a blog with words and pictures about life during wartime. Hometown Baghdad is a video blog put together by some guys living there who travel around with hidden cameras to chronicle what life is like. Here is a sample of their work.




After watching and reading, I feel like the man might have felt after the first mud was washed from his eyes: I can see things moving, I just can’t quite make them out. For all of the noise that gets made about Iraq on our side of the water, I had very little idea of how people went about their daily lives. I did notice that, while all our news outlets talked about the bombing of the Iraqi parliament and what it meant that the Green Zone had been compromised, the Iraqi bloggers talked about the loss of the bridge – that’s what mattered most to them.

We are being given a chance to see in ways we have not before. May we wash our eyes clean so we can see clearly and respond with intentionality and determination.

Oh -- and apropos of nothing, there's a new recipe.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: darfur

We had our service on Darfur this morning at church and tonight we met to watch Darfur Diaries: Message from Home. After the film, a group of us shared some soup and talked about what we had seen and tried to figure out how to respond to a situation that is half a world away, more horrific than we can imagine – even after seeing the video, and so large and complicated that it leaves us feeling helpless and overwhelmed.

We talked for a long time about things we can do. One of the things we kept coming back to was writing letters and making phone calls to our government officials to urge, shame, and embarrass them into action. The late Senator Paul Simon said, "If every member of (the U.S.) the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different." With that in mind, here are some links to places that will help us get our voices heard and hopefully the voices of those in Darfur as well.

Save Darfur has petitions to President Bush, and the United Nations.
Human Rights First is asking 200,000 people to "stand in" for a victim in Darfur.
The Genocide Intervention Network has great talking points on how to call your member of Congress.
Africa Action has another petition to President Bush as well as a Legislative Action Center.
Be A Witness is petitioning the media for better coverage of the crisis in Sudan. They also have this wonderful commercial that all of the networks have refused to run.




Evangelicals for Darfur have a petition and some wonderful worship resources -- on the same page.
Save Darfur also has some ways to involve your congregation.
Africa Action also has a Religious Action Network.
Though not specifically about Darfur, here is information about the U2charist.

If you want to know how your representatives are voting on Darfur, check out Darfur Scores.
The Sudan Divestment Task Force is looking to apply economic pressure.
Other resources I've found are Darfur Peace & Development, The Enough Project, IRIN Africa, and a great blog called The Coalition for Darfur.

One of the ideas Ginger mentioned in her sermon this morning was committing to "tithe" ten minutes a day to raise awareness about what is happening in Sudan. Ten thousand people a month are being mudered, not to mention those who are being raped and tortured. The situation is about to reach a tipping point such that the death toll could increase ten fold. We need to be talking, writing, calling -- anything we can think of to let our leaders know we want them to take decisive action to stop the killing. In ten minutes, we can sign email petitions, call one or two of our elected officials, or tell a friend about what is going on. In The Soul of a Chef, Ruhlman tells of one guy who wanted to work at The French Laundry so badly that he made about forty copies of his resume and a cover letter, put them in envelopes that were addressed and stamped, and put on in the mail everyday until all of them had been mailed. His sheer persistence got him an interview and, ultimately, the job he wanted.

Ten minutes a day.

We are planning to host a Dinner for Darfur in a few weeks in our parish hall and ask our members to bring someone who doesn't know what is going on. We will serve them a meal, give them the information we have collected, and invite them to take action as well.

The other thing we talked about was how to come to terms with the extreme pain and suffering in Darfur alongside of all of the pain and suffering we know about: the folks still homeless on the Gulf Coast, the tsunami victims in Asia who are still sleeping on the ground, our friends and family who have struggles of their own. One of the key paradoxes of faith is when we voluntarily enter into the pain of another the load lessens for us all. The only way anything will change in Darfur is if we look beyond our helplessness, our feelings of being overwhelmed, our hopelessness and voluntarily choose to figure out how to enter into their pain. "They" are not dying in Darfur; WE are.

Please take some time (ten minutes?) to check out the links. Please take time to comment and add more links, ideas for involvement, and anything else you want to say. Jesus said when we do anything (or don't do anything) to "the least of these" we are doing it to him. How will we live with ourselves if the Darfurians are exterminated while we are too busy to choose to help?

Sorry, I don't mean to preach. I do mean to offer an invitation. Please, join in and help our brothers and sisters in Darfur.

Peace,
Milton

lenten journal: awakenings

Several weeks ago, Ginger asked me if I would put together a worship service focusing on the genocide in Darfur as a way to inform our congregation and help people know what they can do. When I started doing my research, I wrote this post and found out rather quickly that the primary response people had was one of feeling overwhelmed and helpless. Since them, I’ve been thinking about how to get beyond those feelings to see what else we can find in ourselves.

I got an email from my friend Burt who was responding to my post on The Secret and he said:

Been reading the Lenten journal ... It's great as always. One thought about the "name it claim it piece," I think in it's right form, it's mature expression, the idea in the spiritual tradition is that consciousness proceeds reality... creates it... or influences and shapes it. So, as conscious (or at least semi-conscious) beings, our thoughtful and awakened presence in the world is a part of the mix and has the possibility of changing things for better (and I guess for the worse too). I think it's in this sense, that I can believe in intercessory prayer... our consciousness and connections are more significant than we think... so are our minds. So... you have this spiritual principle that's been around a few thousand years and pops up in all sorts of places but what happens is, that in the hands of immaturity it turns into the shit that we hear and that you wrote about. Most "shit" out there has some connection to reality... even "name it, claim it."

I chewed on his paragraph for a good while today as I looked over worship resources and articles on Darfur and found myself pulled by his phrases:

• in it’s mature expression the idea in the spiritual tradition is that consciousness precedes reality
• our thoughtful and awakened presence in the world is a part of the mix and has the possibility of changing things
• our consciousness and connections are more significant than we think
• in this sense I can believe in intercessory prayer

Intercessory prayer is an enigma to me. I’m not saying it doesn’t work; I am saying sometimes I’m not sure. When I pray for someone I can take a meal to, I can feel it. Praying here in Massachusetts for my father-in-law as he recuperates in Alabama leaves me a bit puzzled. Would the healing happen differently if I had not prayed? Would they have found more cancer? If enough of us had been praying over the last four years, could the genocide in Darfur have been averted? Are those fair questions?

The beginnings of the trouble in Darfur started at about the same time George W. Bush decided to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003. We have people keeping count of how many soldiers have died. We hear about car bombs and IEDs most everyday on the news. Yet ten thousand people a month are being killed in the Sudan (my father pointed out to me that’s about fifteen people an hour) and we have not been awake to those numbers for the most part.

How then should we pray? How then should we live?

Since I grew up in Africa, I have a pretty sensitive antenna when it comes to news from the continent and I get a little snippy when what the American media feed us are photographs of Britney Spears’ shaved head and Anna Nicole’s funeral. Two weeks ago the Zambezi River flooded in Mozambique leaving almost 300,000 people homeless. I’ve not heard it mentioned in any American newscast. The news makes my heart hurt; the lack of coverage makes me angry. Yet, I still don’t know how to pray.

Trying to awaken a congregation to the needs of the refugees and victims of the civil war in Sudan is risky because offering the information and challenge as an invitation rather than a polemic is a difficult high wire to walk – at least for me. My passion too quickly comes across as indignation. I want people to hear for the first time things I’ve been conscious of for a long time and rise up and do something.

That’s the next issue: do what?

There are petitions to sign and speakers to hear. We are going to watch a DVD Sunday night as part of our emphasis. There are organizations to support and contributions to make. I realize, though, when I say we can pray I’m almost apologetic, or at least a little dismissive, as though it is an action of last resort: there’s nothing we can really do, so let’s pray.

I’m not satisfied with either side of that equation.

I know part of what I have to get past within myself is the feeling (which I’m not proud of) that if people just knew as much as I do about Darfur or cared as much things would be different. It’s not my primary feeling, but it’s there and it can get the best of me. I may know a lot, but I’m still sitting here in Marshfield ranting into my keyboard. I don’t need to start wearing my “activist” button just yet. I’m not someone other than the folks in our congregation who are frustrated and perplexed by what is going on in the world. I’m one of them. Neither Marshfield nor Darfur has given any indication I might be their Messiah.

Burt talked about our “thoughtful and awakened presence.” It just struck me that he didn’t say awake, but awakened, as in someone else woke us up, opened our eyes. Once again, I’m back to prayer:

open my eyes that I may see
glimpses of truth thou has for me
open my eyes illumine me
Spirit divine

Peace,
Milton

only connect

Since our first real cold snap a week or two ago, the door on the driver’s side of my Jeep Cherokee Sport has been locked up. I’ve become quite adept at entering the car from the passenger side and, I’m sure, have provided a good bit of amusement to people in various parking lots around the South Shore. Today, when I took my car to have the oil changed, I got the door fixed as well. The problem was not big, they told me: the locks had dried out.

While they were fixing the car, I was next door in the Dunkin Donuts drinking coffee and reading my Utne Reader (one of my Christmas presents from Ginger). The first article was called “Our Blackberries, Ourselves” by Lisa Else (taken from a longer article in New Scientist magazine), in which she discusses whether all the opportunities we have to be “constantly plugged in” help us to be better at self-reflection and community:

People are connecting one on one – they have their online social networks or their cell phones with 250 people on speed dial – but do they feel a part of a community? Do they feel responsibility to a set of shared political commitments? Do they feel a need to take responsibility for issues that would require them to act in concert rather than just connect? Recently, connectivity and statements of identity on places such as Facebook or MySpace have themselves become values. It is a concern when self-expression becomes more important than social action.

Her words took me back to familiar words from one of my favorite novels, Howard’s End by E. M. Forster, which looks at the changing face of human interaction as the technology changed drastically in the days before World War One:

Mature as [Henry] was, [Margaret] might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire . . .

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

When my family first went to Africa in 1957, the only way to get to Southern Rhodesia was to sail from New York harbor, across the Atlantic Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, to the port of Beira in Mozambique on the southeast coast of the continent. The voyage took thirty-one days. When we wanted to call our family in the States at Christmas, we had to make a reservation weeks in advance with the international operator and then pass the phone around quickly so everyone could speak in the three minutes we were given to talk. What news we got from family came by mail that arrived two weeks after it was written.

By the time we came back to America for our first leave four years later, we could fly and be back in Texas in just a few days. Tonight I can read any African newspaper I want with the click of a mouse. I love that I get the chance to make contact with those of you who read this blog – and particularly with those who comment – and I’m aware that it is more than “only” connecting because how we connect is also important. Many use pseudonyms for their online identities. Some reply anonymously or without a way to respond other than in the comment box. I love that I can look at the map on Stat Counter and find readers from Singapore to Seattle; I even had one from Azerbaijan. I love reading the blogs of people with whom I share some “cyberintimacy” because I want to see what the next chapter in the story is. My world is wider because of this blog. And Lisa Else has a point: the value of the connection is only as good as the community it creates. We are treading new ground here. No one before us in human history has had the capacity to get so much information so instantly and in such volume. When I log on to AOL to check my email, I’m often presented with a “news” page that juxtaposes things like “Three hundred killed in car bombing” with “Man breaks hot dog eating record,” as though the two stories deserve equal consideration.

It can’t be as easy as “only connect.”

It isn’t. Listen to Forster one more time:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

The endless stream of the twenty-four hour news channels tells one story, shows another in a smaller window, and ticks another across the bottom of the screen, fragmenting both our world and us. Margaret’s sermon was to connect head and heart, heart and hands, passion and prose, faith and action, thoughtfulness and intentionality, patience and urgency so that life feels like something other than a centrifuge.

We are paradoxically blessed to live in a time when we can know what is happening around the world. These are days of wonder and days of incredible responsibility. “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded;” Jesus said, “and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48). I ‘m still floundering trying to figure out what knowing about the situation in Darfur means for my life. What I’m learning is I’m missing an important connection if I think of it in terms of my life or my response alone. It is in the connections that “human love will be seen at its height” – connections I find in family, in church, and here on this blog that help pull the fragments together.

Peace,
Milton

can you hear me now?

There are days that writing comes easy and days it doesn't. There are also a lot of days in between where I find something to say once I get myself up the stairs and put my fingers on the keyboard. Every so often comes a day like today where the issue is not whether it's easy or hard to write as much as it is whether I feel like I have something to say.

When I get to a day like this, the first fear I have to face is the prospect that I'm on the precipice of depression again. I've had moments over the past few days -- more like a week, I guess -- where I can feel the depression lurking around the edges of my life like a stalker in a Lifetime movie. That it can't find a way to get inside gives me some hope that my new medication is working and for that I'm grateful. This week marks six years since I took my first dive off the deep end, as it were. Sometimes I think the pull of my depression is as much muscle memory as anything else. And then, of course, this particular January has offered its share of crisis and uncertainty, creating the opportunity for a symphony of emotions.

I'm also struggling to write tonight because I don't feel very good at what I'm trying to do. I've been writing about Darfur because I really want to have a conversation about how I (we?) can respond. When I wrote about the war in Iraq a week or so ago, I yelled so loudly through the screen that I hardly gave anyone a chance to respond, so few did. My las two posts about the genocide in Sudan garnered two comments. I realize way more people read this blog than comment, and I also realized how much I hoped to hear from more folks when I felt my disappointment at seeing zero comments on yesterday's post.

This is starting to sound as though I fishing for comments, which is not my point. Let me make my point clear: I'm writing about the genocide in Darfur because I want to have a conversation about what we can do beyond calling and writing any and everyone in Washington asking them to wake up. I want to talk about what it means to pray for them. I want to talk about what to do with my sense of helplessness and hopelessness as I look at how the world treats Africa. I want to know how to say all of this in a way that is invitational rather than declarative.

Peace,
Milton

requiem for darfur

Just as I was getting to work on Saturday, Scott Simon introduced a segment about a Carnagie Hall performance of Verdi's Requiem to benefit the refugees from Darfur. I made a mental note and went to the web site to listen to the program. What I know of classical music I mostly learned from movie soundtracks, so the significance of the chosen piece is a little lost on me. I did find this description at Christopher Lydon's Open Source, who also has a program on the concert:

As great as any of his 28 operas, Giuseppe Verdi’s one Requiem is beyond category among the masterpieces of human affirmation in the depths of suffering and horror. Verdi wrote it in his 60’s to mourn and remember his artistic heroes, the composer Rossini and the poet-novelist Manzoni. The Requiem lives in the choral and orchestral canon as a monument to Verdi himself: his belief, doubt, compositional craft and melodic genius. The work encompasses confessions of sin and guilt, a tour of hell, affirmations of faith and aspirations to heaven. Verdi’s “Dies Irae,” not normally part of the traditional Catholic requiem Mass, has become a Hollywood favorite soundtrack for unidentifiable terror. Prisoners at Terezin, the Nazi camp in Czecholovakia, learned and played the Requiem in defiance of their helplessness. Musicians play it still, not least to remember Terezin.

George Matthew was the conductor for the concert. He was conducting Verdi's piece for the first time. It was not his first time to assemble a variety of musicians and singers for a cause. He conducted a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to raise money for Asian earthquake victims. When Scott Simon asked him why he felt compelled to organize this concert, Matthew said, "We as the classical music community had to say something with our craft."

When Simon asked why Verdi's Requiem, Matthews said it is "at once the music of mourning, at once it is extremely stern, and it is at once full of fear, of active terror in the face of death and really what happens to the human spirit when it's confronted with the prospect of becoming nothing." He went on to talk about its explosiveness and said following those explosions there was "the silent space which is the fertile ground for action." To him, the music suggested that "In our human environment, the prospect of a individual dying unnoticed is not acceptable, it is not natural, and it is certainly not conscionable. It's almost by virtue of the fact that someone is dying, the community must gather and Verdi is speaking to our deepest and best instincts."

Lydon wrote in his commentary of the interview he did with Matthew, "My question to George is how his grasp of Verdi, and Beethoven, can strengthen our limp notions of what is happening in Sudan; how even a rapt contemplation in listening to Verdi can relieve our very contemporary American distance and indifference to what has become the hellish wallpaper of our media and our minds."

I haven't listened to Lydon's show, but I wonder if Matthew's answer to the question was much like his answer to Scott Simon: "We as the classical music community had to say something with our craft." In offering their gifts, the musicians and singers are doing what they can to not let human beings die unnoticed and strengthening our sense of connectedness in the best way they know how.

Our call is to listen and then go and do likewise.

Peace,
Milton

lives in the balance

I've spent the better part of my day reading about what is happening in Darfur in preparation for a worship service we are going to devote to what is happening there and in other parts of Africa. Between the news of famine, AIDS, malaria, and all the other things that afflict the continent, Darfur stands out because it is genocide. My research has been colored by this quote from Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

In his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, President Bush said, "“We will continue to speak out for the cause of freedom in places like Cuba, Belarus, and Burma -- and continue to awaken the conscience of the world to save the people of Darfur." He didn't give any specifics. I have no need to doubt his sincerity and I don't think his words or actions are going to be what changes things on the ground in Sudan, if Mead is right. And I think she is. So, with determination to become one of those thoughtful, committed citizens, I share what I found today.


As far as understanding the situation in Darfur, I found the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum description helpful:

Sudan's Khartoum-based government is fueling ethnic and racial violence by using the Janjaweed militia as proxies against Darfur insurgents who launched a rebellion in early 2003. But it is civilians who are suffering. Government-sponsored actions include:

INFLAMING ethnic conflict IMPEDING international humanitarian access, resulting in deadly conditions of life for displaced civilians BOMBING civilian targets with aircraft MURDERING and RAPING civilians

Darfurians who have fled the violence provide chilling testimony. One refugee told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that “the Arabs want to get rid of anyone with black skin. . . . There are no blacks left [in the area I fled].”

The death toll exceeds 100,000 and may be more than 400,000. And the crisis continues—the lives of hundreds of thousands more hang in the balance today.

I also loved that the museum is working to apply the lessons we all say we learned from the Holocaust. They also have a disquieting slide show called "Staring Genocide in the Face." Please take time to watch it.

Save Darfur.org has a post called Unity Statement that's worth checking out for the specific things that can be done to help change things in the region, some big and some small. They also have resource packets for worship services of different faiths. In the Christian packet, there is this prayer from a Darfurian woman:

I want to join my prayers to many other voices. Every few months we are driven away from one refugee camp to the other, so far in the desert where nothing, nothing at all exists. This is no way for a human being to live. Now way to live in such a shocking place -- uncultivated, waterless, treeless, and barren region. Everything is burning, Lord, around me, around us; in me, in us. Everything is barren -- hell, hell. Yet, Lord, we believe you are there beside us. We pray for all the Africans living now our same condition. Bring back peace and tranquility to our beloved country. Peace which is desired by everybody, the old and young, rich and poor, women and men. Amen, amen -- let it be so. (© Gloria Silvano, Sudan/CAFOD)

They also offer a sample prayer for use in our worship:

Loving God, we know there are tremendous problems facing the world -- natural disasters, civil wars, violence, disparities in resources, and sickness. We confess that there are days when we look the other way, change the channel, or pretend the problems don't exist. We say that the problem is someone else's concern or displace the blame. We are not confident that we can make an impact and we fear failure for ourselves and on the behalf of others. We might even think that moving to make a difference will change us in ways we will not like or make us uncomfortable. Before we begin, we desire to give up on our opponents and on the victims. Forgive us for our faintheartedness and selfishness, for failing to love others as we should, and for failing to believe that you have empowered us to protect our brothers and sisters. Remind us, Holy One, that some faithful persons refused to give up on us and that You have not given up on any of us. Amen.

Sojourners also has a worship packet and includes this prayer from the United Nations:

Merciful and compassionate Spirit,
Be present to the suffering people of Sudan
Shelter the widows and the children
Comfort all who are weary and afraid
Bring relief to those who hunger and thirst
Center our thoughts with those who suffer in silence
Move us to recall our shared humanity
Unite us in our determination to respond to injustice
May we never forget! May we never forget!
Hear our prayer. Make our action swift.
Amen.

The prayers bring me to another Margaret Mead quote:

Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.

I don't know what happens when I pray for Darfur. I'm not giving God any new information. I'm not casting some sort of magical spell. I'm challenged, therefore, to articulate what it is I'm praying for. After today, I'm praying to be changed, to be made uncomfortable. One of the things I've said about turning fifty was I felt some relief because I was coming to terms with my limitations. When I was thirty, I thought I was running out of time to change the world. At fifty, I didn't feel that pressure any more.

I'm wrong. The call to be faithful and committed has no age limit.

Peace,
Milton

Photo is from photo essay, "In Darfur, My Camera Was Not Nearly Enough" by Brian Steidle.